Hilda Lam owner of Ho Sun Hing printers assembles lead letters to print a laundry ticket that was an example of all the print styles available. Canada’s oldest Chinese-Canadian print shop, which closes for good on Friday, March 28, after 106 years in business.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Hilda Lam owner of Ho Sun Hing printers assembles lead letters to print a laundry ticket that was an example of all the print styles available. Canada’s oldest Chinese-Canadian print shop, which closes for good on Friday, March 28, after 106 years in business.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Hilda Lam owner of Ho Sun Hing printers assembles lead letters to print a laundry ticket that was an example of all the print styles available. Canada’s oldest Chinese-Canadian print shop, which closes for good on Friday, March 28, after 106 years in business.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Disassembled machinery in Ho Sun Hing printers, Canada’s oldest Chinese-Canadian print shop, which closes for good on Friday, March 28, after 106 years in business.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Hilda Lam owner of Ho Sun Hing printers assembles lead letters to print a laundry ticket that was an example of all the print styles available. Canada’s oldest Chinese-Canadian print shop, which closes for good on Friday, March 28, after 106 years in business.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Hilda Lam owner of Ho Sun Hing printers assembles lead letters to print a laundry ticket that was an example of all the print styles available. Canada’s oldest Chinese-Canadian print shop, which closes for good on Friday, March 28, after 106 years in business.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Lead letters in a box at Ho Sun Hing printers, Canada’s oldest Chinese-Canadian print shop, which closes for good on Friday, March 28, after 106 years in business.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Hilda Lam owner of Ho Sun Hing printers assembles lead letters to print a laundry ticket that was an example of all the print styles available. Canada’s oldest Chinese-Canadian print shop, which closes for good on Friday, March 28, after 106 years in business.Gerry Kahrmann
/ Vancouver Sun

Owner Hilda Lam and her family have spent the last year selling off a century’s worth of equipment and ephemera at Ho Sun Hing Printers, which operates out of an art deco building at 259 East Georgia in Vancouver.

Many of the presses the company owned were antiques, and attracted interest from boutique printers across North America.

“All the machines are gone, except for that Linotype over there that’s broken down,” Lam said. A buyer was expected this week to take it away.

Art collector Bob Rennie picked up four sets of Chinese lead type, which have 8,000 characters for each font. A buyer in Victoria bought a framed photo of the late Chinese Nationalist party leader Chiang Kai-shek that used to hang upstairs.

But there is plenty of stuff still for sale, from printer’s stamps to uncut sheets of lead and ancient oak desks.

The business is closing because there isn’t enough of a market for the high-end printing the company specialized in. At 81, Lam also wants to retire. So she put the building on the market last year, and it sold for $1.65 million.

The company was started by Lam Lat Tong, who left his job as a railway cook to start the Ho Sun Hing Rubber Stamp shop in Vancouver in 1908.

At the time, Chinatown was only a few blocks along Pender and Westminster (now Main), and most of its residents were bachelors who lived in rooms above Chinatown’s businesses.

Chinese immigrants after 1885 had to pay a head tax to immigrate to Canada, which meant both Lam Lat Tong and his son Fong Lam paid it. (In China, the family name comes first, in Canada it was flipped around.)

The company’s first location was at 205 East Pender. In 1920 the company moved to 438 Main, and two years after that relocated to 258½ East Pender, where it operated until the company moved to its present location in 1963.

The company rented its previous locations before paying $20,000 to purchase 259 East Georgia. The building has almost 6,000 sq. feet of space over two floors, including living quarters upstairs which once housed family members.

“This is the whole immigrant experience,” said family friend Lilly Tan, showing off the upstairs to visitors. “From rags to riches. You started with a small print shop where the whole family would pitch in, and from there they built it up.”

The company became a Chinatown staple in the Fong Lam era, doing printing for Chinese restaurants all across Canada, in both English and Chinese. Hilda cobbled together the company’s old sample of lead type for a Sun photographer — a price list for a Chinese laundry.

Asked how long she worked at the print shop, she laughed and said: “I’m 81 now. I started here when I was 18. You figure it out.”

Hilda grew up on the edge of Chinatown in a couple of small houses that were razed in the 1960s for the MacLean Park social housing development. She was in the same class at Strathcona School as Angelo Tosi, who operates the legendary Tosi’s grocery store

around the corner at 624 Main.

She and her late husband Fong had five sons and three daughters, and they all paid their dues at the print shop. Her son Brandon, 53, jokes that he has worked there “since I was born.”

Hilda isn’t sure what the future holds for the building, which was probably built in stages in 1909 and 1937.

“Some Asian guy bought it. That’s all I know,” Lam said.

Brandon thinks with a bit of renovation, it would make a great restaurant or bar.

“It seems to be the going trend around here,” he said.

“There are a lot of those ‘public houses’ and ‘social bars.’ I think it would make a great restaurant — it has a nice high ceiling. There’s a lot of history in this building.”

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Canada’s oldest Chinese print shop closes at 6 p.m. today, after 106 years in business

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